This brief indictment was originally a paragraph in {What can we do here?}, itself a much-copied transcription that by custom was bundled with the so-called Sermons of Egderus, presumably delivered during his tenure as Superius Frater at Mountain House. A later curator extracted this passage from that Writing to its own document, certain that its two sentences (or three, depending on how it is parsed) represented an instance of migratory text, claiming that it was in fact a bona-fide Saying of the Remnant, and as such belonged with others of its kind.

The thesis that motivated this act of violence upon an ancient arrangement of the Archives has ramifications that can be treacherous, but worth outlining here, as no one else seems to have perceived the need for this essential forensic work.

To begin with, the mention of the ghosts in the second clause at least implicates the Last One, whose Writings constitute an entire discourse on the entities (or, perhaps better said, collective symbol) he calls the ghosts: his assertion in those writings is that their origin, medium of action, and dwelling place are all founded in — if not wholly constituted by — text.

Although Egderus never mentions the ghosts anywhere else in his extant writings, he is all but universally believed to have passed along the works of the Last One when he gathered, preserved, and transmitted the Archives during the Goliadic Age. This being the case, it is hard to believe that Egderus was not familiar with the Last One's theories, and may well have become "infected" with one or another of that elder Author's crabby ideas — for example, that text is lying all the time.

But this is mere background. It is when we try to analyze the *transmission* of this tart morsel of invective that the true dimensions of the matter begin to emerge.

Let us begin with the obvious, as contemporary investigators are ever advocating. This string of text (migratory or not) was found *among* the Writings of Egderus, and so may well be a writing *by* Egderus. If so, is it complete, in its present form? Perhaps, but this seems unlikely: Egderus is frequently aphoristic, but almost always attributes his pithy sayings to the Remnant, and even then only to illustrate or support one point among many in a longer essay, sermon, or memoir — ie, Egderus never seems to have composed epigrams that stand on their own.

But Egderus is hardly unique in quoting the Remnant, nor in employing crisp locutions of his own invention. Let us allow, then, that this particular example is a fragment of some other Writing — whether by Egderus or not may be argued elsewhere.

The question is, what motivated its extraction from the document in which it was found?

[The text of this peculiar — and peculiarly long) legomenon breaks off here, just as (or so it seems) its argument was hitting its stride. Further investigation of this mystery is underway, but has yet to yield any reasonable explanation... — Ed.]